Gnash Project

Rob Savoye wrote:

"The forth alpha release of Gnash has just been made at version
0.8.1. Gnash is a GPL'd Flash movie player and browser plugin for
Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript2 classes. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are in progress for a future release. The plugin works best with Firefox 1.0.4 or newer, and should work in any Mozilla based browser. There is also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.

Improvements since the 0.8.0 alpha release are:

* New Garbage Collector, which reduces runtime memory.
* Support for device fonts on X11.
* New build and packaging work to build multiple GUIs at the same time, and to eliminate dependencies between the various toolkits used.
* Support for dynamic text fields.
* Better key event handling.
* Support for on-demand install of needed Gstreamer codec plugins.
* Support for KDE/AGG combination.
* More robust parser
* Better support for flash player detection.
* Many new testcases!

Gnash supports the majority of Flash opcodes up to SWF version 7, and a wide sampling of ActionScript 2 classes for SWF version 8.5. Flash version 9 and ActionScript 3 support is being worked on. All the core ones are implemented, and many of the newer ones work, but may be missing some of their methods. If the browser only displays a blank window, it is likely because of an unimplemented feature. All unimplemented opcodes and ActionScript classes and methods print a warning when using -v with gnash or gprocessor. Using gprocessor -v is a quick way to see why a movie isn't playing correctly.

You can grab the Gnash sources from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnash/0.8.1, or from Gnash CVS with the tag "release_0_8_1_final". Binary packages for Debian or RPM based systems will be available from your GNU/Linux distribution, and from whatever BSD variant you are using. Please report packaging bugs upstream to your distribution. If you think you have found a bug in Gnash, then you should file as complete a report as possible at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=gnash. Patches are always preferred to bug reports, as this is a community project. You can submit patches at https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=gnash, or email them to gnash-dev@gnu.org. As heavy bug fixing and development is going on, please make sure your bug still exists in cvs HEAD before reporting.

Please include the operating system name and version, compiler
version, and which gnash version you are using, in your bug
reports. For bugs in the plugin, please also add the browser and
it's version. Gnash does not support Firefox versions below 1.0.4.

Questions about Gnash or offers of help can go to the developers email list at gnash-dev@gnu.org."